The 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to Roy J. Glauber, John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch for their work on quantum optics. In particular, Glauber gets half the prize “for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence,” while Hall and Hänsch split the other half “for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique.”
I figure it’s our duty to tell you that, although I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert on quantum optics or lasers. Sounds like a worthy prize, though. In the meantime, you can become an expert yourself by playing this laser game.
It’s hard. And that’s just classical geometric optics! Just imagine how tricky quantum optics must be.
October 4th, 2005 at 9:57 am
Agghh, you did one too. Was not there when I started writing the post. I guess I should have looked again before hitting “publish”!
Cheers,
-cvj
October 4th, 2005 at 10:11 am
The laser game is cool. Wasted some time on that a while back. Finished it, but tried it again over a year later and it wasn’t so much fun to bash my head against the same brick walls.
October 4th, 2005 at 11:52 pm
Wow, I got to level 17 so far.
Looking at level 20, I’m not sure I want to go any further. I expoect addiction will compel me.
Early on, I thought “This isn’t so hard…..”
October 5th, 2005 at 12:16 am
I finished level 17 with a mirror left over. A very addictive game.
Gavin
October 5th, 2005 at 1:15 am
It’s level 23 that is the killer.
October 5th, 2005 at 8:52 am
23 is hard, but I found 19 harder, actually. 23 has two of the tricks in, though. I also found 11 quite hard.
The ones with lots of blocks and one-ways are the easiest, I think, because it’s not that difficult to trace back from what’s often obviously the last bulb. The ones that are just bulbs and bombs are the hardest (for me, at least, but I may be hard of knowing).
And thanks, Sean, for wasting a bunch of my day yesterday. Yes, I blame you.
October 5th, 2005 at 10:49 am
And when I say that I found 19 harder, I really found it hard. I infected a few people with the lasergame bug when I did it before, and there did seem to be some variation, from person to person, in who found what level difficult. Nobel Prize-winning Quantum Optics is probably even harder, as you say, with less variation.
October 6th, 2005 at 6:24 pm
19 was tricky, but 23 was the one that gave me laser dodging nightmares. After that 24 and 25 were sort of anticlimactic. Thanks for the fun link.
Gavin
October 6th, 2005 at 8:03 pm
We’re all about inducing nightmares here at Cosmic Variance. Sometimes it’s about who will play us in the movies, sometimes it’s about laser dodging.
October 7th, 2005 at 10:37 am
I must be a moran, because i can’t get past level 8.
October 7th, 2005 at 1:11 pm
Just pretend the splitters are actually mirrors.